Ice-nine

As people are mostly water, ice-nine kills nearly instantly when ingested or brought into contact with soft tissues exposed to the bloodstream, such as the eyes or tongue.

[3] The phase transitions without any thermal effect and into the state of lower entropy described in the book are purely fictional and impossible according to the current mainstream physics.

In Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, ice-nine is described as an example of a wampeter in the fictional Bokonon religion, the pivot around which a karass, or a group of randomly interrelated people, revolves.

[7] Leonard Susskind's The Cosmic Landscape calls Cat's Cradle and its use of ice-nine a "cautionary tale about madness and instability in a world full of nuclear weapons", as well as being based on the real scientific principle of metastability.

[8] In Dr. Strangelove's America, Margot A. Henriksen states that ice-nine represents a collaboration between science and the military that, like with the atomic bomb, proves their "indifference to the fate of the human race", and the "inhuman and immoral results of [...] pure research".